Semantic Portals for Cultural Heritage

Cultural content on the web is available in various forms (documents, images, audio tracks, videos, collection items, learning objects etc.), concern various topics (art, history, handicraft, etc.), is written in different languages, is targeted to both laymen and experts, and is provided by different independent memory organizations (museums, archives, libraries) and individuals. The difficulty of finding and relating information in this kind of heterogenous content provision and data format environment creates an obstacle for end-users of cultural contents, and a challenge to organizations and communities producing the contents. Portals try to ease these problems by collecting content of various publishers into a single site [43]. Portal types include service portals collecting a large set of services together (e.g., Yahoo! and other “start pages”), community portals [46] acting as virtual meeting places of communities, and information portals [36] acting as hubs of data. Much of the semantic web content will be published using semantic information portals [31, 36]. Such portals are based on semantic web standards 1 and machine “understandable” content, i.e., metadata, ontologies, and rules, in order to improve structure, extensibility, customization, usability, and sustainability of traditional portal designs. Cultural heritage is a promising application domain for semantic portals [20, 41, 50]. They are useful from the end-users’ view point in several ways: